NEW YORK (AP) — The surging price of oil reached another milestone Monday, jumping to an inflation adjusted record high of $103.95.

The weaker dollar that has propelled oil and other commodities prices higher sent light, sweet crude for April delivery past $103.76 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That’s the level many analysts consider to be the true record high for oil, after its $38 barrel price from 1980 is translated into 2008 dollars.

The price later traded up $1.81 at $103.65, fluctuating with the normal ebb and flow of trading.

Oil’s most recent run into record territory has been driven by the greenback’s slump against other world currencies. Crude futures offer a hedge against a falling dollar, and oil futures bought and sold in dollars are more attractive to foreign investors when the dollar is falling.

Gold, copper and wheat are among the other commodities that have rallied in recent weeks as the dollar has fallen.

Notice this bit:

As for where oil goes from here, analyst estimates vary widely, with some predicting an eventual decline to the $65 or $70 range as supplies continue to grow and demand falls, and others seeing oil rising as high as $120 as investment capital continues to flow into oil markets from overseas.

For its part, the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration’s latest prediction is that oil will average $86 a barrel in 2008, up 19 percent from 2007, when oil averaged $72 a barrel.

The verdict is in. The Fed’s emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed.

Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter.

The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.

It is hard to imagine a more plain-vanilla outfit than the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages bridges, bus terminals, and airports.

The authority is a public body, backed by the two states. Yet it had to pay 20pc rates in February after the near closure of the $330bn (£166m) “term-auction” market. It had originally expected to pay 4.3pc, but that was aeons ago in financial time.

“I never thought I would see anything like this in my life,” said James Steele, an HSBC economist in New York.

Emphasis added by me.

Get used to hearing that phrase — I never thought I would see anything like this in my life — because you’ll be hearing it over and over again. Some of you will be saying it!

Judie Lipsett of Gear Diary will confirm that about a month ago I was talking to her about interest rates plummeting to zero in Japan. Now that might happen here too:

The greater risk is slump, says Princetown Professor Paul Krugman. “The Fed is studying the Japanese experience with zero rates very closely. The problem is that if they want to cut rates as aggressively as they did in the early 1990s and 2001, they have to go below zero.”

This means “quantitative easing” as it was called in Japan. As Ben Bernanke spelled out in November 2002, the Fed can inject money by purchasing great chunks of the bond market.

Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act allows the bank – in “exigent circumstances” – to lend money to anybody, and take upon itself the credit risk. It has not done so since the 1930s.

Emphasis added by me.

And yet the three mainstream candidates for the Presidency of the United States go on as if we are not inexorably sliding towards an unprecedented abyss.

And, oh yes, it will be unprecedented.

Look around you. We are not the people who withstood the Great Depression. We have an abundance of criminals. We didn’t have that back then. We are also saturated with illegal guns. Another thing we didn’t have then.

Over at the CloudBooker forum, there’s some grumbling about WiFi issues. It’s unclear if it’s hardware or software. Before I pull the trigger, I’d want this sorted out. It’d be no good to buy a machine for mobile blogging only to have it not maintain a connection to the Net!

Despite the issue of fan noise, the most troublesome issue we encountered during the test period was heat. While plugged in the bottom of the CloudBook reached temperatures of 126 degrees Fahrenheit (too hot for direct skin contact over an extended period). HDTune reported hard drive temperatures as hot as 56 degrees Celsius (133 degrees Fahrenheit). During our benchmarking tests (which stressed the system and generated more heat) the WiFi card inside the CloudBook would stop working after 30-45 minutes of use. The only way to get the WiFi card to start working again was to turn off the CloudBook and let it cool down for at least 10 minutes before restarting the system and connecting to the Internet again.

When a notebook overheats to the point that it stops working every 30-45 minutes you know there’s a serious problem. Below are images with the external temperatures listed in degrees Fahrenheit.

Asus has shown off a next-generation EeePC with a larger screen and trackpad. Converting the 399-Euro price to our devalued American Dollar, results in a price near $600! Sorry, but that’s just too high! There’s also an EeePC coming with Windows XP pre-installed (are you listening to that, hp?).

On Friday, I saw a brand new UMPC from a Taiwanese manufacterer being hurriedly packed up and shipped off to CeBIT. I can’t say which one yet, but stay tuned for pics and updates on new VIA based UMPCs as they are unveiled at CeBIT.

It is with deep regret that we inform our users, friends and fans that we will be shutting down the AllPeers service today. We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.

This is the worst tech news I’ve seen in some time!

I used AllPeers just about daily! I would chat with Judie Lipsett of Gear Diary with it. I’d get files from England. You wouldn’t have seen any coverage of this and this without AllPeers. Those files never made it to P2P (believe me, I checked!). AllPeers also enabled me to finally get torrent files because that capability was built-in and I didn’t have to go research client software.

AllPeers was the best damned thing to happen to the Firefox browser!

Now it’s gone.

You’ll never know what you missed. Months from now you’ll wish it still existed.

Journalist Dawn Porter investigates the world of lesbianism. Setting herself strict rules, she immerses herself in a world of women only, moving in with lesbian housemates in Soho and working in a busy lesbian bar. She also interviews experts on female sexuality, while a scientific probe that measures sexual responses provides some surprising results.

As this topic might be controversial for some people, I’ve placed everything else after the More.